https://slow-is-smooth.io/tags/testing/Recent content in Testing on Shai AsherHugoen-gbFri, 11 Sep 2026 16:35:00 +0300https://slow-is-smooth.io/blog/the-retry-limit-that-broke-a-bloom-filters-one-promise/Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:35:00 +0300https://slow-is-smooth.io/blog/the-retry-limit-that-broke-a-bloom-filters-one-promise/<p>A Bloom filter makes exactly one promise: once you add a key, it will never tell you the key is absent. Last November I published a compare-and-swap loop that gave up after a hundred tries, and wrote that the bit it might leave unset was an acceptable trade-off against livelock. It was a trade against nothing. While only Adds are writing, that loop cannot fail a sixty-fifth time, let alone a hundredth. The operations that really could lose an Add were somewhere else in the library, and they never retried anything.</p>